Comparison and Contrast Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Comparison and Contrast - Essay Example story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1899, chronicles the physically isolated life of a young woman suffering what was probably post partum depression while Willa Cather’s story Paul’s Case, written in 1905, describes the social isolation of a young man who dreams of the theatre, yet each character experiences a similar loss of reality, or perhaps perceives a deeper glimpse of reality, as a result. In Gilman’s short story, a woman slowly loses her sanity as a result of her inability to conform to societal norms. In the story, an unnamed woman and her family take up residence in a remote mansion as a means of giving her the rest her husband has prescribed for her. The woman takes up residence in an upper room of the house, thought to have originally been a nursery, with bars on the windows and old faded yellow wallpaper attached to the walls. This wallpaper plays a large role in the progression of the woman’s illness as she begins to see women creeping around inside it, trying to escape the oppression they, too, have experienced. â€Å"Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads† (Gilman, 1899). She is either going crazy because of her extreme boredom or she is seeing a deeper reality in t he concept of the trapped woman suffering at the definitions placed upon her by others. Through the course of the story, the woman transforms from an individual who adores the outside and green growing things to the artificial creation of man as it is represented in the impenetrable confines of the room. In the end, she chooses to join the other world she sees, effectively becoming insane in this one. This is similar to the action Paul takes in Willa Cather’s story. From the beginning, the reader is led to see the ways in which Paul views the world differently from those around him. He creates